IIIT Hyderabad Publications |
|||||||||
|
Decision Making under Risk: studied using gambling gamesAuthor: Dhriti Sailesh Goyal Date: 2019-04-18 Report no: IIIT/TH/2019/59 Advisor:Kavita Vemuri AbstractRisk is an estimation of a desired outcome not achieved, but is central to decision making. Here, context and condition define decision making and risk. Hence, it is imperative for research to examine human responses in different situations to reduce stereotype threat. In this thesis, an attempt is made to understand general stereotypes around gender, trust/emotions and education training with risk taking propensity. Two gambling experiments were designed for this work. One uses the European Roulette Wheel while the other is a modified version of the traditional two player Centipede Game. Emotional changes due to the evaluation of trust and the decision making anxiety are measured using somatic state markers (skin conductance and heart rate). To look for activation at the neural or cortical level electroencephalography (EEG) has been used and the P300 event-related potential waveforms were analysed for variation in game play. Individual game play using the roulette wheel corroborates past research of women being more risk averse than men while the two player game analysis shows women to be taking a higher/similar risk than men. Results from the education stream (engineering and social sciences) comparison indicate that participants from social sciences take significantly higher risks than participants from engineering in individual play though co-player presence shows the opposite trend, which we attribute to probable competition in engineering training. Gender gap was observed in the individual play in both the education streams. While no gender gap was noticed in engineering when co-playing, the gap still persisted in social sciences. Results of this experiment are important as it recommends a re-look at stereotypes, either gender based or education stream, determining access to decision making roles. The behavioral results from the centipede game reveal trust as a probable dominant factor as the results show a direct roportionality between game play turns and trust scores. This was estimated by the termination of the game at a later node with higher trust score between the players. Considering the physiological variation, an overall increase in skin conductance and heart rate during the game-play is noticed compared to the baseline data as expected when undertaking any cognitive task. Interestingly, opponent's action showed higher skin conductance amplitude than during self-play for the same decision, which implies that the cognitive process applied to form prediction model of other's game choices is higher than during self decision making. Preliminary EEG data showed that P300 amplitudes were higher for positive feedback (opponent's pass) than for negative feedback (opponent's take). Additionally, the P300 amplitude was higher for a ’take’ than ’pass’ and we attribute this difference to competitive game play dynamics. P300 waveform was identified from the electrodes covering the frontal and parietal brain region, the areas supporting a cognitive process like decision making. Though not conclusive due to the sparse channel EEG device used, the findings indicate the possibility of measuring a complex process like decision making under risk using EEG technique. Further work is being conducted using dense channel EEG system for conclusive results of neural correlates. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Cognitive Science |
||||||||
Copyright © 2009 - IIIT Hyderabad. All Rights Reserved. |